In Organizing A Tribute To Jazz Legend Ella Fitzgerald, A Champion Of Classical Music Shows That ... She's Got Rhythm

April 04, 1997|By Howard Reich, Tribune Arts Critic.

The voice was one of the marvels of nature, a sublimely expressive instrument capable of caressing the blues at one moment, unleashing a torrent of sound the next. Whether she was letting rip with a series of brilliant high notes or producing soft and gauzy lyric phrases, Ella Fitzgerald brought the art of jazz singing to previously unimagined heights. No diva before or since has swung as hard, nor has any matched the high-flying virtuosity that the First Lady of Song reeled off with seeming effortlessness.

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that less than a year after Fitzgerald's death, at age 78, Chicago would see a major tribute to the great artist. That the event, "I Remember Ella," will take place later this month, on the 79th anniversary of Fitzgerald's birth, also seems serendipitous.

The surprise, though, is that the driving force behind the tribute is not some veteran singer or jazz impresario but, rather, one of Chicago's most fervent champions of classical music and highbrow ballet.

"A lot of my friends were a bit startled to hear the news," says C. Geraldine Freund, who's best known for presenting dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov and composer Luciano Berio to Chicago for the first time (in the '70s), and for staging her extensive International Festival of Ballet (in the '80s).

"They said, `Why are you doing jazz, Geraldine? What on earth for? That's just not what you do.' "

In part, Freund's tribute owed to two events: By tragic coincidence, 1996 brought the death of both Fitzgerald and Freund's son, Kenneth, who had been a fervent admirer of the inimitable jazz singer.

Ever since, both events have haunted Freund.

"My son was a great fan of Ella's, and he bought just about every record she made," explains Freund, whose 37-year-old son died unexpectedly last year.

"So I guess that my son is part of the reason I'm doing `I Remember Ella,' but it's really designed as a tribute to one of the greatest musicians of all time.

"To me, it doesn't matter so much if I'm presenting classical music or ballet or jazz or whatever -- the important thing is to acknowledge the work of a great artist."

The work of formidable jazz musicians, however, is not always appreciated in classical circles, let alone revered. Freund stands as the exception to the rule, and she dates her jazz awakening to a party she happened to attend in the 1970s.

"I suppose my interest in jazz began when I was visiting Tanglewood," says Freund, referring to the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

"Young conductors like Lenny (Bernstein) and Berio and (Claudio) Abbado were at a party there, and they started to talk about jazz. And I just listened, because I didn't know anything about it.

"But when I heard how enthusiastic they were, when I heard them talk about how jazz inspired them, I said to myself: `I better start listening.' "

By the late '70s, Freund began frequenting Greenwich Village jazz clubs with Berio and others, soaking up the music and, perhaps inevitably, falling in love with it.

"We would stay up until the wee hours, visiting practically every club in town," she remembers. "We couldn't get enough of the music."

Thereafter, Freund would venture annually to the French Quarter in New Orleans to hear the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, when the ensemble still was staffed by black and Creole musicians who had been playing jazz before the term had been coined.

An impressive offering

Now, the veteran impresario has come full circle, as she prepares to present the music she has studied for so many years. Her "I Remember Ella" tribute certainly shows erudition, touching on several chapters in Fitzgerald's career.

For starters, Tommy Flanagan, one of Fitzgerald's finest piano accompanists, will lead a keyboard salute to the diva during the April 26 concert in the Rubloff Auditorium of the Art Institute of Chicago. He'll be joined by his trio and guest vocalist Carol Sloane.

To touch on Fitzgerald's work with various jazz orchestras, Freund has engaged the Harvard University Jazz Band (in its first Chicago appearance).

And because Fitzgerald was devoted to young people, Freund has arranged for an appearance by students from Chicago's Suzuki-Orff School for Young Musicians, who will venture into jazz fare.

The crown jewel of the show, however, should be the world premiere of a new jazz version of Aaron Copland's "Lincoln Portrait." For this performance, Freund has retained the original text (drawn from Lincoln's speeches and letters) but commissioned a jazz score from noted Chicago composer Cliff Colnot.

For his part, Colnot has spent the last several months reconceiving the "Lincoln Portrait" with new orchestrations of music by Duke Ellington, with whom Fitzgerald collaborated on the landmark recording "Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Songbook" (Verve).